Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Do Follow

I was over at Dirt Digger's blog, "Blunders with shoots, blossoms 'n roots", the other day and noticed an icon I hadn't seen before. "Spread Link Love Do Follow," it said. What in the world? So I clicked on the "Read More" link. Yes, I'll follow any link given a chance, even ones I have no clue as to what they are and who doesn't want to spread the love?

It turns out our wonderful blog hosters automatically put the "nofollow" HTML attribute on our comments. I had no clue. I don't go in and read the source code from my blog very often. For those that are clueless to what I'm talking about, "nofollow" tells the robots that spider the web to not follow the link, but more importantly it means your link is considered not important and isn't counted in calculating your ranking on search engines.

They do this to try to keep spammers out. They figure if spammers can go up in search engine rankings by posting, then there will be a lot of spam out there just waiting to happen. Does it? I doubt it. People still have to type in that annoying list of letters to post a comment. And I have power. Muhahahah! (I was actually at an evil laugh contest the other day and the guys can do it so much better than the girls, but in print we are all the same). I can delete any comment that I don't like. I haven't used it yet, but I can.

Also I take umbrage to them calling my commenters unimportant. I love my commenters. So from now on you will be counted. I've changed my template to get rid of that tag. Now if I could only figure out how to change my comments page, I can add an icon.

3 comments:

Hi Daphne, muwahhaha back at you! I love it! I had seen that tab but didn't click on it. Thanks for figuring it out and fixing it. I am not sure how wordpress handles that, but the links do work from your comments. Long live the comments!Frances

Frances, Your welcome. BTW the links have always worked for people pressing them. The only thing this helps with is putting my commenters higher in the search engine rankings. The change is all under the covers. You should not notice anything different.

About Me

I've been gardening for almost three decades now, ever since my husband and I bought our first house. Every garden has been different. The first was small and the soil was almost pure sand. The second was larger and I had heavy clay. The third and current one which is just outside of Boston, is by far the largest even though the lot is by far the smallest. Since we bought the house new, we designed the landscaping ourselves, and the soil we added was fairly good. My challenge here is the location. We are so close to our neighbors that their houses can shade the garden.